303 Nation "Double Speed Mayhem"

i could swear these sounds go with these imagesor perhaps it's the bit before - before she leaves the club - just her face flashing in and out of the strobing darkness - looking utterly inexpressive, affectless, stunned perhaps - while arms flail around her and stricken-with-bliss faces come into view momentarilywhat a track! available only on the PCP compilation Frankfurt Trax: Volume 4 - a lost classic of acieed-gabber, the 303-riptide riff shredding the fabric of time-space. Its annihilating gusts of cosmic virulence almost sound like the blueprint for The Mover's own all-time darkgasm peak "Apocalypse Never".Similar to this monstalove the voice at the start - "dis is my concept - here it is"

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Well, how weirdis that- just as I'm on this demented trip into gloomcore remembrance at the moment, Marc Acardipane emerges from silence to give an interview - perhaps his most informative to date. Published only a few days ago, it's by Richard Brophy and it's for Juno Download.

Highlights, information-wise, include:

- although in earlier interviews he denied any connection to or influence from EBM and industrial, Acardipane talks about getting a copy of Front 242's Official Version and seeing shows by 242 and Nitzer Ebb. "I liked the sounds they
made but not so much the beats, and I liked the beats of Chicago house and
Detroit techno, but the sounds were a little too soft for me

- on the phuture rush of first hearing Second Phase "Mentasm" and the Belgian brutalist tekkkno sound: “There were things you
never did before, sounds you never heard before. I remember
being in Dorian Gray the first time I heard Joey Beltram’s “Mentasm” and I
thought he was an alien! I remember hearing T-99’s “Anasthasia” for the first
time and was thinking, ‘what the fuck is this?.... It's something that people will not experience nowadays.”.

- on having so many alter-egos (nearly 90 solo aliases, 40 different collaborative identities) - "I developed a character
for each one; T-Bone Castro could only work with open hi-hats, Nasty Django was
his nasty little brother, and so on.... Some magazine
said that there weren’t real people behind all of my projects. So one time when
we were doing a gig in Italy there was an Italian guy with a beard who looked
the character we did on the Atari computer for the act Ace The Space. We took
his photo to prove that it was a real person behind the music!”

- on Suburban Knight’s “The Art of Stalking” - it was the inspiration for Alien Christ and one time he listened to that track "for eight hours straight one night for
inspiration"

- on Cold Rush - the "last
tunes you hear on the dance floor before you die of an overdose”

- on whether he will record new music any time soon - "I need to go into a
certain mood, it’s dark and sensitive, but with hope”

- on archival releases - late last year Forbidden Planet put out a 4-track vinyl featuring "Waves of Life," "The Emperor Takes Place", "Nightflight (Nonstop to Kaos)" and "Mesmerize" - there are also vague plans to "finally put out a bank of
unreleased material recorded during the wild days of the early ‘90s" and well as a new compilation of previously released material.

- the famous evocative titles actually mostly came from his PCP partner Thorsten Lambart - "He was a master at thinking up amazing names
for the music. I think this is one of the reasons... why a lot of people in the UK and US liked us. For most of our time
together, we did a lot of higher thinking, trying to use more than the 20 per
cent that most people use.”

I've seen reference online to Miro having been a regular at Frankfurt's Music Hall club in the early 90s - perhaps that temple of boom is what's homaged in "Hall"? For me the title always suggested the idea of Valhalla - the slain warriors final carousing place.

So gloomcore really it is a triumvirate. The Mover, of course, takes precedence as Originator, but all three reign supreme. It's a Germano-Franco-Croatian Empire, gloomcore (I'm assuming that's the origin of Pajic, although the bio says he was born in Frankfurt).

The first thing I heard by Miro was a triple-track EP - 1996's Chapter II: The Zombie-Leader Is Approachin'. The contents live up to that wonderful title, and to the equally mind's-eye-sparking titles the tracks have, such as "Skeletons March".

"Cold XTC" seemed to be a big clue to what this sound was about - already gestured at with the PCP sub-label name Cold Rush. MDMA's sensousness and shimmeriness, but with the empathy muted. Isolationist hardcore.

"Snowy" is the word, the image, that enters my mind with so many of his productions -- cold but cuddly. You feel swaddled in the buzzy sound.

But it's also visual - a splendor of canopied dazzle, under which the kick pummels thickly.

Clearly he was thinking along the same lines, judging by the titles.

What a tune -- I picture a speed buggy leapfrogging across snow dunes and ice ridges, kicking up a wake spray of glassy granules.

Evidence is one of his identities I slept on a bit at the time - although I have all the tunes, I think, but possibly was reaching the gloomcore overdose point when I acquired them.

Another terrific track from that identity.

An alter-ego I never even came across at the time - it was a challenge finding the tunes, there was only one or two places in NYC you could get them - was Frozen. Very much in the Cold Rush vein - desolate, mournfully melodic, bare-trees wintry.

Now there's two other Miro tunes that I think are right up there with "Apocalypse Never", "Torsion", and his own "Hall".

The first is this collaboration with Oliver Chesler, under the name SuperPower - and with Miro further alter-ego-ing himself as Hypnotizer

And then this drums-only monster.

As I wrote elsewhere, a symphony in four-to-the-floor... a multi-tiered architecture constructed out of just kicks, claps and hi-hats, plus the halo of reverb and the gated crispness of attack.

Compared with others in this series, he's not that shrouded in mystery. In fact there is a detailed bio out there. There are photographs too, unlike with some of the others, although it is my policy here not to reproduce them, in deference to the "faceless techno bollocks" principle.

But while the bio fills in the life story - born 1974 in Frankfurt; rave conversion experiences at the Omen, legendary club where Sven Vaeth played intense and incredibly long sets; meets the PCP guys and starts making tracks for the sub-labels Dance Ecstasy 2001 and Cold Rush Records; the collaboration with Chesler; following the Mover when he splits from PCP to start Acardipane Records - it doesn't really tell you anything about motivations or inspirations.

What follows is highpoints of the Miro's trackography, in more or less chronological order, but with tunes already posted above omitted.

Miro - "Arize" b/w "Destroy"

Reign - Chapter One: Skulls and Crossbones (Cold Rush - LOST 8)

Hey, hey - that's a sample of Steve Reich's "Come Out" in there - "come out to show them"!

Dark, churning maelstrom...

The original version of "Light and Dark' on a multi-artists Dance Ecstasy 2001 EP Frankfurt Trax Vol. 6.

Reign - Time Machine - Dance Ecstasy 2001 - DE 2054 - 1997

One of his best, this 4-track EP

With those three there's a sort of rattling clatter to the drums - grinding, clanking, hissing - a threshing machine cranked up to brink of breakdown. Nerve jangling, exhilarating.

This one seems to hark back to / intensify the Belgcore T99 "Anasthasis" sound.

I'm not sure where in the discography, or when in the sequence, this next one was recorded - no reference to it in Discogs.

Miro - Blue Sun b/w Bass Drum Elevation - Dance Ecstasy 2001 -

Miro - Understand b/w Purple Moon

Miro - Shining / It's Like XTC- Acardipane Records

Miro - Rizing High b/w E-motion

Evidence - "Resist"

The stuff that Miro did under his many more gabber-gabber heil-heil identities, Stickhead and Jack Lucifer, mostly for Kotzaak Unltd, a sublabel of PCP -
is - as you'd expect - thrashing (influenced by death metal allegedly), flailing, for-the-jugular hardcore - superior specimens of the genre indeed - but I prefer the atmosphere and, dare I say it, musicality, of the gloomcore material.

Miro also maintained an identity - Steve Shit - for breakbeat hardcore and jungle tracks on PCP's White Breaks imprint. And a pretty decent fist he makes of the UK sound too.

Now did he just coin the term "breakcore" there? In 1994?

The stuff as Hypnotizer on Things To Come, with and without Chesler as collaborator (under SuperPower) is a whole different bag - there's a retro tinge (but it still sounds like phuture) and there's also the vocals, which flash back to Electronic Body Music (tyranny for you - and you and you and you!) but with a drug-fucked slurriness, a drooling megalomania.

SuperPower - The Future Crusade - 1997

Hypnotizer - Into Nowhere EP - Things To Come - 2002

Hypnotizer - Normality Is Insanity EP - Things To Come - 2004

Hypnotize - Electronic Erotic - 2006

Now unlike the Mover - who seems to have gone very quiet since the Tresor album of 2003 - Miro actually reinvented himself in the late 2000s - and nowadays, under his full name Miro Pajic, makes slinky-but-dark.... well, you'd have to call it micro-house, really.

In 2010 there was a whole album of this kind of thing on Harthouse, Saturn Drama.

It's not so far from the humid, polytendrilled stuff Villalobos does. Something I intend to investigate, for old time's sake. Although I doubt it will displace the Nineties Miro tunes that reign forever in my heart.

Finally - since this here is the last of the gloomcore heroes in this series - more episodes to come but no other inhabitants of the Lost Zones, I don't think - here are some thoughts of K-Punk's on Gloomcore that I've purloined from Dissensus:

what i love about gloomcore is that(1) it has a consistent philosophy, a conceptual world - like all genre production, it is not about 'self-expression' but the exploration of certain conceptual, affective and sonic permutations - I guess an alternative name for it would be Gothic rave, rave beyond the pleasure principle....

(2) the sound actually delivers what the track titles promise - I remember being crushingly disappointed with heavy metal as a kid because the titles would invoke all manner of infernal practices but when you got to hear the music it would just be hoary old rock and roll - like all rave, gloomcore is not 'music' at all and it revels in the 'machinic surplus value' of new technology, the potentials for production of abstract sounds that have no correlate in nature.
See you in 2017!

Thursday, April 23, 2015

"Jean-Claude Risset as a brain in a jar struggling to start a car via telekinesis. Enormous, gritty plumes of non-kick, n-dimensional marble mazes feeding massive garbage disposals, infinite lattices of hydraulic tennis matches" - Chris Madek of Bee Mask exalts the becoming-abstract techno of Metaspliceat Electronic Beats"The tracks arrayed symmetrically across its four sides begin and end abruptly, each a fixed window on a process which unfolds with no interest in whether or not anyone is listening. It might feel voyeuristic to hear these pieces if they didn’t sound so inhuman; instead, the impression is much closer to the uncanny".

Thursday, April 16, 2015

press release -"As part of BritWeek’s 2015 celebration, Novation and dublab are partnering to present Second Summer of Love, a special event Upstairs at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles on thursday April 30th. This happening will be dedicated to the rise of Acid House in the UK during what became known as the Second Summer of Love. This music movement, which spanned the unusually hot British Summers of 1988 and ’89, changed the state of music worldwide. dublab DJs will be playing classic songs from this period amidst projected, archival artwork and photographs. The Second Summer of Love event will pay tribute to influential clubs like Shoom, Trip and The Haçienda while celebrating the legacy of the scene’s producers and DJs whose work influenced contemporary dance music.

Monday, April 13, 2015

What the figures in this series have in common is mystery... A shroud of non-knowledge envelops these operators. Visually and biographically, the archive is depleted, nearly devoid of information. Such that for the most part you couldn't even say these entities possess "mystique", since that would require an aura of some sort, substantive qualities upon which fascination and intrigue could be based. There's just the records.

Compared with Holy Ghost Inc., someone like Marc Acardipane is a veritable public figure, a well-documented known quantity. I have seen four interviews with Acardipane or with PCP (but where he's clearly the label spokesman, if unidentified). Two featurettes from 1993 in iD and NME, an in-depth Q/A in Alien Underground, a substantial feature in gabbazine Thunder. There's probably other pieces in German and Dutch.Even chatted with Acardipane on the phone once, would you believe! Did an impromptu interview too I think (certainly a quote or two made it into this piece) but didn't glean that much, being completely unprepared.

But Holy Ghost Inc.... as far as I know, the only substantial bit of writing about them is Matthew Ingram's thing for one of his blogs, as now gathered in The Big Book of Woe. And Matt didn't have much to go on beyond the music itself: no quotes, zero biographical info. The mystery remained intact.

As it happens, I once spoke to Holy Ghost Inc. on the phone too. Very briefly. Blown away by "Nice One Boy," which was getting a lot of play on the pirates in '92 and also hearing the even more amazing "Jihad" on the Give Peace A Dance comp, I'd rushed out to buy the EP (where "Jihad" reappeared under the name "Psycho Missus") . Rang the number on the label and spoke to - I think - Gary. Who kindly sent me a bunch of their releases, including the cult classic "Mad Monks On Zinc" and things they'd done under the aliases The Saucer Crew and The Ouija Board.

Now I probably would have got round to doing a piece on them, except the very next thing they did was on Blunted, a subsidiary of Island, and it was a complete switch in direction. I was so hyped to review it when it came to my next turn to do the Singles Page at Melody Maker. But from the title Megawatt Messiah to the EP's sonic contents themselves, it was as disconcerting as it was disappointing . Nothing like the sample-lashed storm of "Psycho Missus" or the mournful ragga-laced darkcore of "Nice One Boy".... closer to an outfit like Fluke, or Sabres of Paradise, maybe. The nonhardcore continuum - i.e. the sort of "techno" outfits that played well with the weekly music papers, that were favored by Lime Lizard or Volume.

This in fact is what I wrote for the March 1994 Singles Page, although I have feeling the column over-ran and this bit got cut out. Other artists that got reviewed, incidentally, were Omni Trio, DJ Nut Nut and Pure Science, Grooverider, DJ Crystl, X Project... and Pulp.

THE HOLY GHOST

Megawatt Messiah (Blunted Vinyl)

Doyens of "intelligent hardcore", The Holy Ghost
have released some wonderfully daft and demented trax like "Jihad", "Nice One Boy" and "Mad
Monks On Zinc". But now that they've signed to Island sub-label Blunted Vinyl,
they've dropped the "hardcore" and are just
"intelligent", in a yupwardly-mobile prog-house stylee. The titles--"Heavy Water", "Ion Horse" and
"Isotopia"--are still wacky, but the music's cleanly produced, tasteful and smoothly grooving. Squelchy bass, exotic samples (including ethno-techno
pioneer

Jon Hassell if I'm not mistaken), trancey beats--but like Fluke, it never quite amounts to the sum of its parts.
Shame.

After this trauma, Holy Ghost Inc's name evacuated itself from my brain for a good few years -- things were moving so fast in those days too - and the next time I came across them was in 1996 with the first of their albums on Tresor. By this point they were more or less situated in the minimal techno zone, making tracks not unlike the more linear dancefloor-oriented things by Monolake.

The strange fluctuations and swerves of their career / discography brings up the question of what Holy Ghost Inc. are doing in a pantheon of hardcore heroes in the first place.

Well, for the duration of "Nice One Boy", "Psycho Missus", and the third track on the EP, the banging "Magnet" (with its irresistible chant "ya pulla me in - ya pulla me in - ya pulla me in LIKE A MAGNET") they intersected with the hyper 'n' helter breakbeats + samples uproar of ninety-two (mate).

"A whoosh like a brain inundated with serotonin, a bassline as agitated as a shrew on the brink of a coronary, French gibberish, tons more weirdness" - me on "Jihad" a/k/a "Psycho Missus"

But even at Holy Ghost Inc.'s most mental and headstrong, it is artcore, suffused with a "oneiric trance-like" quality (as Matt Woebot put it).

Other Holy Ghost Inc. tracks have a breakbeat element, but the vibe is closer to The Black Dog - ethereal, eldtritch, unbodied to the point of translucence - than Urban Shakedown or 2 Bad Mice.

The artwork and labels and titles often hint at hermetic, esoterrorist inclinations

A Holy Ghost Inc. hallmark is the use of vocals - "chopped-up", "stroboscopic", as Matt put it - but the mood is different than your usual rave-fodder hypergasm divas ... hark at the plaintive beseeching almost sombre way way the diva asks "are you ruuuuuushing?" in this beaut below... Although it's quite possible she's asking "Are you Ruuuuuuuussian?".

And their earliest tunes are coming from somewhere completely different altogether - the peripheries of the chill out and ambient house moment circa 89/90, seemingly.

"Walk On Air (sunandmoon Mix)" was a David Mancuso favorite for the latter days of The Loft and appeared on one of the Nuphonic compilations based around his / its aesthetic.

And then there's this, which is sort of post-acieeed maximalist, like Bassomatic swirling down the K-hole.

Wouldn't know how to classify this... except to say that I could imagine one or other of the Hardkiss bros working it into a set.

Heading towards trance....

Holy Ghost Inc. belong to a protean moment in rave when the strands that would separate out into hardcore, hard techno, trance, and electronic listening music / IDM were all entwined in a single pulsating ball of protozoan possibility. "Mad Monks On Zinc" was an across-the-board cult favoritek beloved by deejays that would very soon be operating in completely divergent scenes, heading in directions away from each other.

It got around that track, lingered in hearts and memories. Indeed in 2007 it would be reissued and remixed by a German label, Flying Circus, who had this to say about it:

AN UNDGERGROUND CLASSIC IS REBORN!“From a time when there were few “rules” in the production of dance music, this track combines all sorts of elements that were heard in the music of the time. Subtle use of a sampled breakbeat, layered over the deep pulsing kick, give the track an irresistible energy on the dancefloor. This carries the listener while the gorgeous heavy atmospherics completely entrance them. The use of a simplistic single hit piano line at a couple of points could put the integrity of the track in jeopardy, but it‘s not so cheesy and lasts for a short enough time that once the deepness kicks back in it just forms a strange memory, like passing lights leaving a fading trace on the retina. At the track‘s climax the “drainpipe“ sounds rise up again, and for a few seconds you’re enveloped in one of the most intensely beautiful synth washes I‘ve ever heard. You want that moment to last forever, but as quickly as you have been lifted up, you are dropped straight back into the beat, and that snappy break sample sets you off again.“The track "Mad Monks On Zinc" has been in Tobias Lampe‘s memory since a glorious clubnight in the very early 90‘s at the legendary "Planet" in Berlin. When Sven Väth played out this track he was freaking out on the dancefloor, but asking Sven for the track's name didn't lead to success, as Sven only pointed to the record with a big grin: the 12" had nothing but a big question mark on it!Finally Tobias got a copy of the record during one of his regular record-hunting sessions in Soho, but it wasn‘t until 1999 when he finally discovered the actual artist & title. At this time Holy Ghost Inc. were better known for making really strong Techno with releases on Berlin‘s Tresor label and not for their early 90‘s releases. Mixmaster Morris was quoted in Mixmag in 1992 saying “cutting edge DJs like Andrew Weatherall were pioneering the Holy Ghost Inc.‘s "Mad Monks On Zinc", the fourth and best in a series of deeply underground, eclectic EPs“.Now, almost 16 years after the original release on their own "Holy Ghost Inc." imprint "Mad Monks On Zinc" is reborn in the company of two fantastic interpretations by Adultnapper and Martin Buttrich.... just at the right time!

The Tresor stuff from the late Nineties still has a trace, an inkling, of the astral elevation Matt Ingram detected in their earlier releases: "their extremely unusual feel for space time... more blank-eyed, more focussed on the infinite horizon than any other electronic music of their era.

Listening again, I do wonder whether I should have picked up The Mind Control of Candy Jones and The Art Lukm Suite in whatever NYC store it was, as opposed to checking them out on the turntables and briskly moving on through that week's pile of platters.

A track from what appears to be the last release as Holy Ghost Inc - The Jesus Nut EP

"Online sampling database ‘Who Sampled‘ lists over 1,500 individual tracks that have “officially” used ‘Amen Brother’ in whole or part, but as someone with a personal collection of amen-sampling tracks in the hundreds (at least), I would wager that’s a conservative estimate – it could be two or even three times that figure. And the original band never saw a bean. A worthy cause indeed."

Robin also includes a "slightly truncated" transcript of his interview with Nate Harrison, who made a documentary about the Amen Break

so the ambient-jungle / dolphin / aqua direction in D&B got just as stalled, as outer-limit-attained, as the darker or more banging aggro directions....

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Better known - although not as widely known as should be - as Renegade Legion and DrMacabre.Also trading as Lunatic Asylum, Mob, Major Disaster, Slut Burger (!) and more ...

Third cornerstone of the gloomcore triumvirate of Marc Acardipane and.... another fellow who will be coming up very soon in this series.

Don't know much about Monsieur Leroux - this is a not fabulously informative interview, with replies that tend towards the flippant and bird-flipping...

But the music speaks for itself

A hero, nay, a god, above all for this tune - perhaps the greatest gloomcore tune of all time?

"Death-ray riffs strobing your flesh and subsuming the dancefloor in a phosphorescent frenzy", if you'll pardon me quoting myself.This next one is also immense.

From the same Danse Macabre E.P.For my money it's only the Renegade Legion / Macabre stuff that seriously rivals Acardipane's output when it comes to the combination of punishment + atmosphere, menace + musicality.

I'm not sure I can distinguish what separates the DrMacabre tracks from the Renegade Legion output as regards an alter-ego sound-signature.Despite putting out his greatest track "Torsion" as Renegade Legion, for some reason he's only ever released two things under that name. The first, a 1993 EP for FNAC called Friends Or Foes? has some already promising titles - "The Weeping Wastes" and"The Renegade March" - totally on the PCP / Cold Rush vibe! Disappointingly, the title track and "Weeping Waste" are a bit trance ordinaire, but "Renegade March" is pointing in the right direction.

And then in 1996, "Dark Forces" b/w "Torsion" for Dance Ecstasy 2001.

Never as possessed by the A-side as by "Torsion", the b/w.

So the greater part of Guillaume's greatness, gloomcore-wise, emanated from the DrMacabre identity.

Paranoid Archives, you've got to love it.And here are some useful mixes - this guy Guillaume has got some diehard fans out there....
His other main PCP-constellation aligned alias was Lunatic Asylum. Which output never grabbed me as much, although listening again, it's more than solid....

Makes sense it would go on Dance Ecstasy 2001, whose output generally had something of the clinical glisten and frictionlessness of the other kinds of techno coming out Frankfurt in the middle Nineties. I don't know if that was the intended positioning of the sub-label, but it certainly sounds like it was trying to plough a path between hardtrance and hardcore.

A collaboration with the maestro himself

Useful mix of just that single alter-ego's output.

Leroux seems to have put out a bunch of straight-down-the-line bassdrum-pummeling gabba but even here the production has a polish and finesse - and there's a tinge of that gloomcore hallmark, the cavernous reverb.

Guillaume Leroux's Facebook seems active and there appear to be some recent mixes on there.